Iran’s Azeris fear ethnic strife, sucking Turkey and Azerbaijan into the war

Over the past few months, Ehsan Hosseinzadeh, like many Iranians in the diaspora, had come to believe a foreign military intervention was necessary to help his people oust an Islamic regime that was oppressing and massacring innocent civilians. But a week after Israel and the US launched a war in his home country, the 38-year-old refugee in France is worried about the conflict dragging in regional powers – to the detriment of Iran and its citizens.

Hosseinzadeh has every reason to fear a conflagration erupting along ethnic, religious and civilizational fault lines that could rip open the wounds of history in an ancient land.

Born in Urmia – a city in the northwestern extremity of Iran that shares borders with Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Iraq – Hosseinzadeh understands a thing or two about the explosive mix of identity and grievance.

An ethnic Azeri (also called Azerbaijani and Azerbaijani-Turkish in Iran) Hosseinzadeh belongs to the largest minority community, constituting around 24% of Iran’s 93 million population. His birthplace is also home to a significant Kurdish population, as well as Armenians and other minorities that have lived in lands where the borders of empires and republics have shifted with the times. The tangle of history can sometimes make the region a diplomatic tripwire for political leaders.

So, on Thursday, when Azerbaijan accused Iran of a drone attack on its territory that injured four civilians and vowed to retaliate, Hosseinzadeh was on high alert. The drone hit an airport building in Nakhchivan, a landlocked exclave of ⁠Azerbaijan bordering Iran, Turkey and Armenia. It was an ominous development.

“You can see the tension is increasing. And there’s also the ethnicity factor. I’m not sure, but I can predict that if an ethnic conflict arises in that region between Turkish people and Kurdish people, both Baku and Ankara will have a tendency to intervene, to play their cards there,” he said, referring to the Azeris, a Turkic people, as “Turkish people” in a telling sign of the complex linguistic-identity mix in the region.

Turkey – which shares a nearly 500-kilometre border with Iran that was drawn in 1639, making it the oldest continuously managed frontier in the Middle East – is at high risk in a regional conflagration. A shared border, an ethnic group straddling a frontier, infrastructure and business interests on either side – all could see Turkey facing refugee and economic crises.

On Wednesday, a ballistic missile launched from Iran and heading towards Turkish airspace was destroyed by NATO air defence systems. Turkey, NATO’s only Muslim-majority member, is home to the Incirlik base, which is believed to have US nuclear weapons. The next day, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a televised speech, warned that the Iran war had taken tensions in the region to a “terrifying level”.

‘Ankara’s nightmare scenario’

Turkey and Iran have a long history of rivalry, competition and have at times supported opposing proxies, especially in Syria and Iraq. But bilateral relations between Ankara and Tehran have held firm, based on mutual economic interests and domestic imperatives to contain the Kurds. Like Turkey, Iran also has an oppressed Kurdish minority comprising around 10 to 17% of the population living in areas also inhabited by Azeris.

But after Operation Epic Fury exposed the Trump administration’s epic failure to calculate the fallout of the war, Washington made a high-profile outreach to Iranian Kurdish armed groups based in the Iraqi semi-autonomous zone. The Kurds, who have a long experience of being “hung out to dry” by Washington, have so far not bitten the US bait. But they are aware that President Donald Trump has provided them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in their historic resistance to regimes in Tehran.

If that opportunity is seized, it could draw Turkey into the Iran war, experts warn. “Turkey is in a bind,” explained Guney Yildiz, senior adviser on geopolitics and strategic insights at the Anthesis-Wallbrook Group. “It just resolved its own 40-year Kurdish war,” he explained, referring to the decision last year by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) to disband, disarm and engage in a peace process. “And now a CIA-backed Kurdish uprising is emerging on its eastern border involving the PJAK [Kurdistan Free Life Party], which is linked to the PKK network. That’s Ankara’s nightmare scenario.”

In the weeks before the launch of the Iran war, as Trump’s US military “armada” was deploying to the region, Turkey engaged in a frantic diplomatic effort to avert a conflict. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan reached out to the US, Iran, Oman and other Gulf countries, as well as Turkey’s other Western allies, in a bid to explain the high-stakes fallout of a conflict for Ankara. The effort failed.

The US making an outreach to the Kurds, Ankara has been put on alert, explained Shukriya Bradost, a Middle East security expert and doctoral researcher at Virginia Tech’s School of Public and International Affairs. “Erdogan is going to be watching this closely. He obviously does not want a Kurdistan in Iran,” similar to the Kurdish semi-autonomous zone in Iraq, Bradost explained. “He could obviously reach out to the [Iranian] Azeris and he’s very close to Baku as well,” she added.

Transit corridors, pipelines, competition and cooperation

Turkey and Azerbaijan share close ties rooted in common linguistic and cultural foundations that have deepened with economic and military cooperation.

During the 2020 Azerbaijan-Armenia war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, Turkish drones and military advisers were critical in handing Baku a victory. Iran, a country that has cordial relations and an open border with Armenia, has traditionally used its relations with Yerevan to contain Azerbaijani-Turkish ambitions in the South Caucasus region. But with Armenia defeat, Tehran emerged from the conflict diplomatically weakened.

Meanwhile, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been patching up ties after the 2020 war. A recent agreement between the two countries for a transit corridor linking Azerbaijan to the Nakhchivan exclave – called the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” – has further sidelined Iran in the region.

The economic stakes in Iran’s northwestern region are also high for Turkey, which receives more than 15% of its natural gas from Iran through the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline.

But the US-Israeli war on Iran threatens to rattle the intricate web of interests and critical economic corridors that maintain stability in the South Caucasus region.

If Azerbaijan, emboldened by its ally Turkey, attempts to mobilise Iranian Azeris, it could touch a particularly sensitive ethnic fault line in northwestern Iran, experts warn. “The risk is that Iran’s western provinces become a proxy space where Turkey backs Azeris and the US backs Kurds, which fragments the Iranian opposition further at exactly the moment it needs cohesion,” said Yildiz.

Hopes fading – but not completely

Iran’s West Azerbaijan province – of which Urmia is the capital – has long been home to a mixed population of mainly Shiite Azeris and Sunni Kurds.

The Azeris, the Turkic group that produced the Safavid and Qajar dynasties before the Pahlavi dynasty came to power, were an influential group that was integrated with Iran’s majority Persians. Their fortunes dipped with the Pahlavis, a regime reviled by ethnic minorities as Persian supremacists.

With the 1979 revolution and takeover of the Islamic regime, the Azeris were back in the national mainstream. Under the Shiite Islamic regime in Tehran, the Azeris are a highly integrated ethnic group in Iranian society. The late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was Azeri, and the community is regarded as the Shiite brethren of Iran’s majority ethnic Persians, who make up more than 50% of the population. “They have international support from neighbouring Turkey and Azerbaijan, and inside Iran, they’re powerful too, because they’ve been part of the system – the political, economic and security structures,” explained Bradost.

The Kurds, in comparison, have fared poorly under the Shiite authorities. But they are the most mobilized ethnic group in Iran, with many Kurdish parties having armed groups based in neighbouring Iraq.

A collapse of central authority could ignite an ethnic tinderbox between the two communities who have historic territorial disputes.

For Hosseinzadeh, who has family in the region, it’s a nightmare scenario. “I’m very worried about a very big ethnic conflict there, because there is, as I understand it, little or no dialogue between the two ethnic groups. And there are very extreme people on both sides. In the Kurdish camp, there are people who say the whole Azerbaijan [region of Iran] is our territory and this is part of Kurdistan. And there are also people in Azerbaijani [or Iranian Azeri] camp saying that we have to join Azerbaijan or Turkey,” explained Hosseinzadeh.

For nearly half-a-century, the Islamic regime in Tehran maintained that it was the only guarantor of stability in the country. Hosseinzadeh, an Iranian lawyer and fervent defender of democratic rights, is at pains to note that he is not echoing Islamic regime propaganda. “The regime warns people of chaos. They say if the regime falls, we will fall. I’m not repeating that perspective,” he stressed. “The Islamist regime has to go. We’ve had 47 years of it, that’s enough. But there are very big and serious concerns in Iran and we have to be careful of those rising conflicts.”

After years of championing human rights and hoping for foreign help to make his vision for Iran come true, Hosseinzadeh today sounds anxious after sleepless days trying to reach his loved ones back home and following the news. “My wish was, and is…but it’s getting a bit pale,” he trails with worry and exhaustion before starting again. “My wish was bringing democracy, a federal democratic government based on human rights for all the people of Iran – not for the supremacy of the Persian people, for all ethnicities,” he emphasises. “And now we’re getting far from that, with the danger with bombardment, ethnic conflict, foreign actors…it’s pity and it’s worrying. But let’s see what will happen in the future.”